Andinos y tropicales: la cumbia peruana en la ciudad global, and: El huayno con arpa: estilos globales en la nueva música popular andina, and: La danza de tijeras y el violín de Lucanas, and: Fusión: banda sonora del Perú (review)

Of the four books published by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú’s Instituto de Etnomusicología reviewed here, Raúl Romero’s Andinos y tropicales: la cumbia peruana en la ciudad global (2007) is the only one that has previously appeared in print, as the chapter “Popular Music and the Global City: Huayno, Chicha and Techno-Cumbia in Lima” in Walter Aaron Clark’s edited volume From Tejano to Tango: Essays in Latin American Popular Music (2002). Romero is to be commended for having made his essay accessible to Spanish-speaking scholars. This new version includes a 46-minute DVD documentary featuring leading Peruvian musicians (e.g., Julio “Chapulín” Simeón of the chicha group Los Shapis, techno-cumbia singer Rossy War) and social scientists (e.g., Carlos Iván Degregori, Rodrigo Montoya) and, as an appendix, transcribed interviews with the electric guitarists Jaime Moreyra of Los Shapis and Edilberto Cuestas of Los Ecos. The original essay’s main contribution to the Andeanist literature was Romero’s analysis of techno-cumbia’s sudden rise to popularity in late 1990s Lima within the neoliberal (free-market capitalist) context of the final years of President Alberto Fujimori’s administration. Unlike the case with Peruvian chicha, whose blend of the Andean huayno, Colombian cumbia and North American rock has been mainly popular among working-class individuals of Andean heritage, techno-cumbia demonstrates few if any audible references to traditional Andean expressions, which Romero argues is one key reason for techno-cumbia’s much greater cross-class appeal in Peru, along with the genre’s sexual imagery (e.g., scantily-clad female dancers) and mainstream pop sound.

Claude Ferrier’s El huayno con arpa: estilos globales en la nueva música popular andina (2010), which likewise addresses Andean migrant identity issues in the realm of Peruvian popular music, examines the performance practices and stylistic history of a new musical style that emerged in the last decade in Lima. Key figures of this contemporary urban reinterpretation of rural Peruvian voice and harp music, which Ferrier and other scholars term huayno con arpa (huayno with harp), include the female singers Sonia Morales, Dina Páucar, Abencia Meza, and Anita Santibáñez, who typically perform with a steel string harp soloist, electric bass player, trap-set percussionist, various dancers, and, in most cases, an animador (announcer or master of ceremony who provides a running commentary to liven up the performance). Ferrier’s book opens with a brief chapter (“Introduction”) that includes a useful summary of the genre’s history. Chapters 2 (“The Huayno and its Urban Transformations in the Twentieth-Century”) and 3 (“Huayno Styles of Áncash and the Highlands of Lima”) lay the historical and ethnographic groundwork necessary for understanding the author’s later discussion of huayno con arpa’s stylistic connections to and borrowings from other mass-mediated musical genres (e.g., Peruvian chicha, huaylas techno, techno-cumbia, huayno pop/romántico, Bolivian caporalsaya) as well as regional solo harp traditions found in Lima’s rural provinces (especially Oyón...